Sun Yat-sen died 85 years ago, and this the 100th year of the 1911 Revolution, which will always be identified with him. He emerged as the leader of a revolution at the end of the 19th century, and was China's first modern politician.

"Modernity" is a concept that has been much debated, especially when compared with tradition. Western scholars first used the term "modern" to mark the progress in Western people's struggles against tradition. But the term was not applied to Asia. For Asian leaders, Western power was the reality. The question for them was how far their countries should be Westernized to avoid being dominated, or worse, conquered or colonized by Western powers.

The first decisive response came from Japanese samurai who helped overthrow the Tokugawa Shogunate. They were prepared to go all out to learn everything they wanted from the West in order to fight back. Other Asian leaders were less eager to allow their countries to Westernize to that extent and continued to believe that their established ways need not be changed by imitating the West. If they thought about being modern, it was only in terms of learning from the West.

Sun Yat-sen was born two years before the Meiji Restoration, in 1866, and grew up during the first decades of Japan's road to modernity. Many like him who grew up in coastal China were exposed to Western trade, and those born in European colonies, wanted to understand how differently the Japanese saw the West.

So, why should we consider Sun Yat-sen a modern politician? Why not Kang Youwei and his young followers who reached positions of power in 1898 and, after the failure of their attempts at reform, organized a political party called the Baohuanghui (Protect Emperor Society)?

Kang's politics was a break with the past, but Sun Yat-sen was already organizing political rebellion in new ways before Kang's "Hundred Days' Reform". The Xingzhonghui (Restore China Society) that he founded in Hawaii in 1894 and in Hong Kong in 1895 was a more recognizable political organization with deep roots in Chinese practice.

Three things helped Sun Yat-sen understand what the West represented: stories of the Taiping rebels, textbooks in his missionary schools in Honolulu and Hong Kong, and British medical scientists in his college. His generation in China was the first to experience the systematic application of European theory and practice to Asian life and thought. Although people in Guangdong and other coastal regions in China had been conscious of Western presence for centuries, their contacts with Europeans had been desultory.

The Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) rulers, too, became aware of the new challenges China faced by the end of the Second Opium War in 1860. Twelve years later and only four years after the Meiji Restoration, they sent Sun Yat-sen and 30 of his contemporaries to the United States to learn how to deal with the challenges. Between 1872 and 1875, 30 students were sent to the US each year.

The 120 students who returned to China prematurely remained half-educated. Although they brought back some of the skills they had acquired in the US, they had to conform to prevailing traditions to serve the Qing Dynasty. None of them challenged that framework during their working careers. Only after 1911 and the fall of the dynasty did a few of them engage in the kind of politics demanded by the republican system that the revolution had established.

But Sun Yat-sen was different. He retained his community consciousness in Hawaii and, through his brother, remained in touch with Chinese institutions like the secret societies. He did not maintain his link with tradition through the great philosophers and Confucian texts, but through the ideas that inspired ordinary Chinese workers and small merchants to operate the secret societies. This was, of course, not peculiar to Hawaii. Chinese communities in Southeast Asia had established such semi-political societies, too.

Some people from Sun Yat-sen's generation did attend English schools overseas, and an increasing number from the next generation went further and studied in Western institutions of higher learning.

A few other Chinese leaders and scholars were also different from the mainstream. For example, despite being a British-trained doctor in Singapore, Lim Boon Keng remained involved with the Chinese business community and also served as a bridge between them and the colonial authorities. After the 1911 Revolution, he became the president of Xiamen University in Fujian province.

Song Ong Siang, on the other hand, was from a Christian family in Singapore that had given up Chinese customs and practices. But he had no political interests and was content to serve the colonial system. That was modern enough for him.

Gu Hongming, born in Malaysia in 1857, knew the West better than any other Chinese of his time and was probably the most Europeanized Chinese in the 19th century. Yet he turned against the West and dug deep into the Confucian tradition in defense of Chinese ways. Clearly, he had no illusions about modernity.

These examples show how some of Sun Yat-sen's contemporaries responded to the West in different ways. They also show what it took to be a truly modern politician in China before 1895. Two basic factors made Sun Yat-sen keenly aware of contemporary reality. One, enough people agreed that the Qing regime was failing and that radical change was essential because political challenge wouldn't emerge from within the system. Two, people agreed that new ideas and institutions from outside could help China recover its greatness, but the ideas had to change Chinese people's attitude without undermining their values of morality, civilization and governance.

Sun Yat-sen did not succumb to the idea of "total Westernization" as a pre-condition for modernity. And till the end, he didn't doubt that the ideological pillars supporting the imperial system were no longer viable and that the republic he had established was consistent with the political culture that the Chinese people practiced. He did what many others were also trying to do, but he was the first to take his idea of change to a political level that was rooted in Chinese practice but built outside the Chinese-literati framework.

Although he had embraced a new worldview drawn from Western concepts, he was imaginative enough to adapt them to Chinese traditions to achieve his revolutionary goals. His ideas were common to ordinary Chinese among whom he grew up, that is, the Chinese communities in Hawaii and Hong Kong. The ideas were common among other overseas Chinese, too.

That his ideas were alive, much stronger than what the upper class Chinese proposed, and its sustaining power at the basic level was something that the elites misread. Thus, in formulating the ideas that eventually became central to his politics after the 1911 Revolution, he brought together a wide range of political concepts. But whether or not he was China's first modern politician and what the level of his modernity was are not in themselves important. What is important is that he was the first Chinese leader to offer a dedicated political leadership for a cause that set China on its own path to modernity.

The author is University Professor and the chairman of the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore.